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Saturday, December 14, 2013

Let’s Strangle Siri!

Siri: “Beautiful woman who leads
you to victory.”

When I worked at IBM’s development laboratory in Poughkeepsie a
long, long time ago, I wrote about the company’s efforts in speech-to-text. The
development engineers told me speech-to-text would be a long, long time coming.
Now, with the Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface embodied in the newest
versions of iPhone, such an advance seems facile.

I recently bought myself an early Christmas gift -- an iPhone – at the Cape
Cod Mall in Hyannis. But I’m looking forward to getting back to Vieques to give
Siri a run for her money with questions like, “Which of the 36 Puerto Rican
holidays are we celebrating this week?” … and, “Are the ferries from Fajardo
running on time today?”

As with any emerging technology, Siri is taking her share of
lumps.

She’s been dissed by late-night comics and taken jabs from The
Simpsons.

Al Pacino reportedly stomped his iPhone into pieces in a Hollywood eatery
last summer during a fit of anger at Siri.

Even Steve
Jobs wasn’t entirely happy with her. He didn’t like the name, but he couldn’t come
up with a better one before launch.

From
what I’ve read, it seems that Dag Kittlaus, one of the founders of the original
Siri app purchased by Apple, named the
service after a woman he worked with in Norway.

In
Norwegian, Siri means "beautiful woman who leads you to victory."

But in Portuguese, siri means crab.So before you give your kid a Siri-enabled iPhone for Christmas, think again.

·Because of calculators, lots of young people can’t do
arithmetic.

·Because of word processing, schools are walking away
from the teaching of cursive writing.

And -- guaranteed -- Siri will cause proper punctuation to become as obsolete as
diagramming sentences.

And
that’s all true. Siri can search the web for you. She can place phone calls for you. She can even spell the spoken
word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
perfectly.

But she
can’t punctuate!

You
have to tell Siri where and what type of punctuation you want to use in your
messages -- by speaking the punctuation during the composition of your message.

For
example, to get Siri to write this:

Hi. How are you? Did you see the game last night!?

You
have to speak this:

Hi period how are you question mark did you see the game last night exclamation
point question mark.

If I
want to dictate the title of this blog post, I would have to speak:

Caps
on let’s strangle siri exclamation point.

Can you
imagine any kid on Planet Earth doing this?

Young
people – most of whom already know less about punctuation than they should –
will speak their messages without a thought to punctuation. As a result, their
messages will appear as one, long, run-on sentence. We will enter an era of
stream-of-conscious writing worthy of James Joyce. If you dare to criticize
them for their ignorance and their laziness, their defense will be, “Well, you
know what I mean.”